A viral story that claimed eating ice cream for breakfast will make you smarter points to a bigger problem in health journalism

For the love of all that is good and true in this world, please
stop telling people to eat ice cream for breakfast.

Listen, I get it. It's fun to write a headline claiming that ice
cream is good for your brain. People love to share good news —
and this news is all over my Facebook feed.

But it's also important for everyone — especially the journalists
who are spreading this — to share the truth. And there's just no
good reason to believe there's any truth to this claim.

Reporters repeating it are, at best, irresponsibly elevating a
single dubious study. At worst, they're uncritically helping to
spread what amounts to fake news.

Here, as best as I can tell, is how this meme got started.

On November 17, the Japanese website Excite.co.jp published
a story claiming that an ice cream breakfast will make you
smarter.

The brief, four-paragraph article cites, but does not link
to, a study by Professor Yoshihiko Koga at Kyorin University.
According to Excite, Koga found that people who ate ice cream had
faster response times and more brainwave activity than those who
had more normal breakfasts. This, apparently, is evidence for ice
cream's brain-boosting powers.

Screenshot

Excite mentions that the research was conducted in partnership
with an unnamed sweets company.

The Telegraph, which also fails to link to the original
study, takes the time to note that encouraging people to
fill their bellies with sugar and milk first thing in the morning
for health reasons runs against literallyeverything we know about nutrition:

"Our brain needs glucose to function, and a high glucose meal
will aid mental capacity considerably compared to a fasted brain.

"This, however, does not condone eating dessert for breakfast. A
study which explores the interaction between consumption of low
and high GI foods, whilst including a fasted group, would
establish a better understanding of this increased mental
capacity."

Which is to say: Cold and sugar will perk you up. But make
regular meals of them and you'll ruin your health.

It's hard to argue too much with The Telegraph's
approach to reporting the study. Though the report doesn't
directly link to the source material or mention the study's
partnership with the mysterious sweets company,
the reporters do seem to have at least read the paper,
and they identify some of the key criticisms.

But since their story hit the internet, other websites and
reporters have repeated the claims, often without key details or
any evidence that they've actually read the science they're
writing about.

Refinery29 and
The Daily Mail nod toward the nutritional impacts of a
high-sugar diet, but also make clear that they haven't read the
original study.

(For the record, I haven't either. After two days of searching, I
can report that it doesn't seem to appear anywhere in English.
And neither the Telegraph nor Excite even bother to mention what
journal it was published in. I've reached out to Koga through his
University, and will update this article if I get a response.)

A reasonable person could ask why any of this matters. It's
a fun story, and it's not like anyone really believes that ice
cream is healthy, right?

Second, it's based on a bad idea about what science journalism
is. There's a whole genre of science writing out there that seems
to privilege a kind of offbeat wackiness over the truth.

That's how we end up with stories every few weeks suggesting
that this time, a mysterious signal was probably
aliens (maybe, but probably not, and you should say so), a fad
juicing program will transform your body (it will, but for the
worse), this crazy facial expression will make you a happier
person (just no), or that a new promising rat study is actually
the impending cure for all cancer (possibly the cruelest subgenre
of all). Often, they're written by people who clearly haven't
read or understood the source material, and they're rarely if
ever placed in the context of the rest of their fields.

Science reporters, editors, and readers should make it clear in
the strongest possible terms: This isn't just a silly diversion.
It's a kind of fake news, it degrades the institution of
journalism, and it makes it harder for the public to tell
scientific facts from sugar industry-fueled nonsense. Stop it.